May 27, 1990

Sincerely Theirs: Letters as Literature

By REYNOLDS PRICE

LETTERS OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Edited by Isabel Bayley.

atherine Anne Porter wrote letters of an astonishing intellectual sinew and clarity with an ease that escaped when she turned to fiction. Despite the fact that the best of her stories, short novels and essays are as strong as any in American letters - ''Noon Wine'' alone can stand, calm, shoulder to shoulder, with anything in Tolstoy or Chekhov - her work has yet to win the wide and steady attention it earns and rewards. Most years I read her collected stories with students at an excellent university; and given the fact that their experience of past writers is generally meager, I unfailingly discover that almost none of them - even those women interested in the work of other women - have ever heard of Porter, much less consumed her adamant shelf of books.

Strange and regrettable as that is, I can think of interesting reasons why. First, her supreme skills were for short forms; and one of the puzzling realities of the literate American public, pressed as it is for time, is a relative refusal to buy and read short stories. Then from here it can also be seen that the worst piece of luck in an unlucky career struck Porter late. It was only in 1962 that she published the novel she had worked on for more than 20 years.

''Ship of Fools'' was a brush-fire commercial success - huge sales, book clubs, a movie, interviews, prizes and the ensuing mud-wrestle of a wildly intemperate critical response, pro and con. In no time the book was one of those frequent hapless phenomena - the novel that sells like hot cakes but is soon abandoned as unreadable. In retrospect, it seems a little less mechanical and embittered than it did; but the backwash of her ''Ship'' 's launching still laps at Porter's best work. And bad luck has dogged her posthumously.

She shares the fate of Hemingway in being the victim of at least one biography of the sort few political villains deserve, much less benevolent artists. With no sustained attempt at comprehension, Joan Givner's 1982 ''Katherine Anne Porter: A Life'' retailed Porter's commitment to personal secrecy and mythmaking, her four unhappy marriages and numerous affairs with young men, her world-roaming restlessness and grim depressions as if they were symptoms of an inbred viciousness, not the common agony of millions who lack Porter's piercing mind and language.

But the final reason for her neglect is larger still; and not at all paradoxically, it is the chief source of her power. The quality of her mind and of the stories she told is fearless, steely and lethal to the most widely cherished illusions of the species - our poisonous grip on romance and self-regard, our panicked insistence on overinflating the bounds of masculinity, femininity, matrimony and parentage. Porter's stories take an aim as accurate and deadly as Nathaniel Hawthorne's, and her prose is leaner, for dissecting deeper. The results are dazzling.

''Letters of Katherine Anne Porter,'' the first selection of her apparently voluminous correspondence, marks the fact that she was born 100 years ago on May 15. Despite a lifetime of chronic ailments, she proved a hardy product of her Texas origins and lived to 90. These letters demonstrate how sleeplessly she shaped her relation to family and home, her friendships, business dealings, all aspects of her world perhaps except for her own romances (only one of which figures here). Whether she writes to a young godchild, a long-unseen brother, an editor or to President John F. Kennedy about his inauguration, the unique keenness of her actual and mental eyes charges her headlong prose with the rare hum of a welcome but dangerous magnetism, heard only when such a splendid witness delivers her findings.

Her encounter with the poet Hart Crane is an early example. Porter had lived and worked in Mexico at intervals for more than a decade when Crane arrived in 1931 on a Guggenheim fellowship. She had known him slightly in New York and offered him hospitality at the large house in Mixcoac that she shared with others. Soon, however, Crane's drunken disorder and Porter's revulsion precipitated a break; and her letter of June 22 is, in its cool fury, an unanswerable depiction and denunciation of the alcoholic life:

''You know you have had the advantage of me, because I share the superstition of our time about the somewhat romantic irresponsibility of drunkenness. . . . Therefore I have borne to the limit of my patience with brutal behavior, shameless lying, hysterical raving, and the general sordid messiness of people who had not the courage to be as shabby as they wished when sober. . . . I believe a drunken mood is as good a mirror as a sober one. . . . Your emotional hysteria is not impressive, except possibly to those little hangers-on of literature who feel your tantrums are a mark of genius. To me they do not add the least value to your poetry, and take away my last shadow of a wish to ever see you again. . . . Let me alone. This disgusting episode has already gone too far.''

More than a year later, at the news of Crane's suicide, she tries to draw back for a gentler look; but her mind barely lets her: ''I did not look at all upon him as some one who must be saved and spared at the expense of every one around him. . . . And besides, all this talk of 'saving' him - he did not want to be saved, he could not be. All that was worth touching in him he put into his poetry, and it is this I wish to remember, and keep and foster. Not that living corpse, who wrote his poetry almost in spite of himself, and who, if he had stayed in the world, would have come to worse ends.''

Though the letters collected here seldom call for such blowtorch intensity, it is a continual sign of Porter's open-eyed sanity that again and again she tries to turn the same gaze on her own failings - her restlessness, her paralyzing depressions, her knack for blinding herself to herself: ''I have a deep, incurable (apparently) painful melancholy, night and day, which just sits on my neck. Its nobody's fault except my own, if it is even that. . . . So now I sit in the sun as if I hoped that would cure me. I think maybe work will cure me.''

It was only a common human tragedy that her understanding was powerless to surmount such a deep inner division and bafflement. Many decades passed - romances, loves, teaching, performing, homeless wandering. The melancholy cruelly prevailed, as it had in her father's life. Letters streamed freely, but it was only in short near-miraculous bursts that she was able to write fiction. In a feat worthy of legend, the great works of her life - three long stories in ''Pale Horse, Pale Rider'' (1939) - were completed in little more than a week's work for each. And ''Ship of Fools,'' though nearly complete in the early 1940's, was only finished in a concentrated few weeks of 1961.

Fortunately, this wide selection of letters provides the best possible antidote to any suspicion that the whole of her life was wretched, a rudderless voyage. Now we have hundreds of pages of firsthand evidence that - whatever her struggles with work, love and a means of subsistence - Porter was rarely less than a solid kind help to a broad range of friends, from children and fellow artists to relatives older than she. The potentially merciless stamina of her scrutiny could shift with ease to an affectionate and witty domestic attention, and her full discussions of religion, politics, American racism and the rise of fascism are brave and eloquent. Till old age dims her zest, the single most constant note she sounds, in the midst of trials and failure, is a burning joyful vitality - a love of the world, its creatures and things.

I mentioned the (unexplained) omission of what may well be hundreds of surviving love letters. They seem the only large strand of her life not represented and may yet appear. A decidedly spotty ''Who's Who'' of correspondents is provided, and the absence of explanatory notes is occasionally regrettable. Otherwise, the editing by Isabel Bayley, Porter's friend and literary trustee, is admirably unintrusive. Without access to the originals, I cannot speak for the accuracy of the text; I can only affirm that every sentence sounds like Porter in at least one of her large range of voices - glad or consoling love, help for artists younger than she, delight in the world, righteous but sober and justified rage at evil and ignorance and the final exhaustion of age.

Katherine Anne Porter would be the first now to grant that life and her own responses to it kept her from much that she meant to do - who says less? But any sane reader could soon assure her that what she did, in her art alone, still waits among us - tall, profound and as unassailable as time allows. In 1943 she wrote to her nephew: ''Ah dear, how pleasant it would be to a writer if only he could know that after years of neglect and evil criticism during his life time, and all sorts of complete misunderstanding of what he was trying to do, he would find his hundredth birthday being celebrated the whole year long.'' This bountiful volume begins at least to answer that hope for a writer who more than earned celebration.

Reynolds Price's most recent books are ''Clear Pictures,'' a memoir, and ''The Tongues of Angels,'' a novel.